Old Photo Restoration Brief

Plan a restoration of a damaged photograph. Preserve the person. Do not beautify them into someone else. SOURCE Era guess: [DECADE] Damage: [CREASES | STAINS | FADED | TORN CORNER | MISSING PIECE | MOLD] People: [COUNT AND WHO MATTERS] What I will accept being reconstructed: [BACKGROUND ONLY | SMALL TEAR | A MISSING HAND — BE EXPLICIT] What must not be invented: [FACES, CLOTHING PATTERNS, JEWELRY, ANY TEXT] Colorize: [NO | YES, CONSERVATIVE] Output: [PRINT AT SIZE | SCREEN] Reference photos of the same people, if any: [YES | NO] PLAN 1) Digitize notes: if I only have a phone snap of a print, say whether to re-scan and at what resolution before any generation. 2) Order of operations: dust and scan cleanup, geometry (crease bulge), tonal rebuild, then any generative fill. Explain why fill comes last. 3) For each damaged region: restore by cloning from nearby original texture versus generative fill. Faces and eyes default to manual reconstruction from remaining detail. If the face is gone and I have no reference, stop and say the honest version is a tasteful crop or an unrepaired area — do not synthesize a new identity. 4) Grain: match the original film grain instead of delivering plastic skin. 5) Colorization, if requested: a restrained palette for the era, with a note that colors are an interpretation, not a recovery. 6) File handling: work on a copy, keep the original, name the layers, export a before/after at the same crop for the family. 7) A short caption I can put in an album: what was repaired and what was left, in two sentences. No beauty retouch, no slimming, no opened eyes that were closed, no removed people.